19th Swiss Classic British Car Meeting in Morges, 2010

As every year, the 2010 19th Swiss Classic British Car meeting is taking place on the lake side of Morges, Switzerland. Very nice weather for hosting 1’600 cars from all over Europe who have only one requirement: being English manufactured. It’s also a good moment to make some photo, however it’s a difficult task: it’s crowded, many cars are ordinary, background is very busy, and you always have someone coming in front of the objective! Not an easy one! You can find below 50 photographs of the 2010 British Car Meeting, all shot with Canon EOS 5D MKII and the Canon 24-70mm 2.8 L USM lens, perfect combinaison for shooting as much details as possible, while being able to have wide coverage in the same time. The f/2.8 stop of the Canon 24-70mm is clearly a big help in this kind of situation vs. a min f/4 stop (Canon 24-105mm) to get the specific beautiful depth of field (dof) necessary to eliminate unnecessary things that could spoil your picture in an elegant and distinctive manner.

Few tips to get better car event pictures

The perfect car picture is hard to take: it should have no disturbance in front, beside and beyond the car. The background needs to be sharp and should emphasize on dramatizing the car beauty. So, if you don’t have lot of space behind the car, it will be difficult

Focus on the details instead: especially on old cars, there are many details that might make you making very powerful shots such as wheels, mirror, logos, … This is where you should put all you framing knowledge into capturing interesting shots, especially with fast aperture settings. Make sure to play with the different vibrant colors that you will have in front of you.

Make photography of everything which is around the event: people walking, smiling and watching at car, or the many different activities that come around it. It should be very interesting and will help telling the story around the exhibition.

The Fête de la Tulip in Morges is happening every year during March-April, for the last 40 years. Around 100’000 bulbs are seed in the Parc of Independance, where the Morges river is ending in the Geneva lake, next to the Castle. The organisators have seed 200’000 tulip bulbs this year, which is probably one of the largest tulip festival in the world, with dozens of multi color variants. Thousands of people come visiting it every day, and depending of the weather, the flowers can last up to 5 weeks!

5 Tips to take great and spectacular flower pictures

Taking great pictures of flowers has always been one of the main reason to purchase a camera for many of us! Flower photos in the magazines and on websites always look full of colors, saturated and have a peaceful ambiance. However, when back at home, the results might not be always as expected. You don’t necessarily need an expensive macro lens, actually a zoom with fast aperture can really give dramatic effect (for info, most of the below photos have been taken with Minolta 80-200 HS G f/2.8). Here are a few tips and advises that might help you make the photos looking really gorgeous and spectacular as the 75 pictures of tulips you can see below:

Shoot horizontally your flowers: many people I see taking pictures of flowers do it with a vertical angle, standing right in front of it. This gives no perspective to the flowers, and you will have very flat render. You need to get yourself at the same level as the flowers, and shoot on a horizontal perspective your subject, like doing portrait. You might have to be on your knees most of the time, so be prepared and do not wear a white trouser!

Arrange the scene to be spectacular with a clean background: have a flower in focus and play around it (rule of third, diagonal…), especially if you have a clean and bright background this will help you a lot to emphasize the scene and glorify it.

Play with zoom, DOF and light: you need to masterize the aperture of your lens, which will blur the background and help you realize the tip #2. Macro lens or tele-zoom (starting at 70mm) might really help you here, and to get great perspective don’t hesitate to go up to the maximum of your lens (200-300mm). Make sure your subject (the flower!) is sufficiently lightened so the render will be even more spectacular. Be careful of too bright light, especially on white flowers, it will just burn the petals.

Look around you to compose the scene: flowers are beautiful, and most of the time deserve to be the only subject of the photo. However do not forget that what’s around you might also give fantastic scene, where the flower will just be an element that will sublimate the overall picture, being on the first or secondary plan.

Do not over saturate the final results: make sure when finalising the render on your computer that the flower colors are not over saturated (red and orange are typically the most sensitive), and that you still have enough details in the the white petals.

English

Here is another view from Morges (Suisse), on the Leman (also called the Geneva Lake in English). It’s actually an older HDR interpreation of this scenery, with more saturated colours. These picture is actually a bit older, and was part of the test I’ve made of my Sony A700 about a year ago now. This camera actually delivers very nice large dynamic range picture which delivers great HDR with a single RAW exposure. I hope you appreciate the view, and if you want some landscape wallpaper, don’t hesitate to go and download on View on the Geneva Lake from Morges (Suisse).

After visiting the website “Entre réel et numérique”, I’ve discovered a great new tool that was introduced in the latest Adobe Lightroom 2.x: graduated filter. I’ve been playing once or twice with it before, but with no real patience to perseverate to get something that has a pleasant result.

I’ve decided to give a try after watching the below video, which simply convinced me about the relevance of this powerful new tool for editing picture

Then, I’ve started to give a try and test it on a few pictures I’ve made in the last days (see previous post here on JHG Photo about HDR tutorial in Lavaux, Vaud, Suisse). I’ve decided to compare it with what I’d have get from HDR, which is a technique I’ve spent lot of time learning during the last years. I also wanted to compare it here with you so you can also have a side by side comparison and make your own opinion on it.

I have to admit that I’m extremely pleased with the graduated filter option, which is probably something that need more attention from landscape photographers. On the below example, I’ve decided to play it frankly, with 4 filters, from to bottom (blue tones, purple tones, orange tones and finally neutral with increased exposure on the Swiss Lavaux vineyard).

The HDR below has been made with one single RAW in 3 different exposures (-2EV, 0EV, +2EV), treated with Photomatix Pro and then in Lightroom.

I’ve listed here few of the pro and cons I’ve noticed from using both techniques:

Easyness

Graduated filters on Lightroom are very easy to be used by all, and within a few minutes, you can get to something pleasant on your landscapes (or whatever else type of photography). It also simplifies the photo workflow, with non destructive work. It however tends to be heavily CPU intensive, since computer is slowing down after adding the first filter

HDR can be heavy to handle when dealing with several scenes, with many TIFF and exposures, but it’s a proven mechanism and is very simple to follow. Could be time consuming for beginners, but it provides instant results at first try.

Local vs. Full zone

With graduated filters, you can work with local zones and make a quick retouch in a simple quick. To make the entire picture, you will only be able to get half of it, so not necessarily wise to use it if you need to work the entire photo.

HDR is providing powerful results on the entire photography, but is not able to make local touch up. You need to work with curves or selective local zone tools for making it.

Accuracy of results and Quality of the output

HDR with Photomatix provides a very wide range of options for “amazing” type of results, which sometimes is close to design and graphism. This is most of the time what makes the people looking at your pictures saying “waw!”

HDR works very nicely with daylight situations, and makes sure that every single spot on the photo has great lightning and contrast.

Graduated filters tend to have very smooth type of results: it provide subtle render, working especially well with the sunset situations.It also tends to prove great results when having very distinct elements on the picture following the rule of third: Mountain on the bottom (2/3), sky on the top (1/3)

Graduated filters, as its name is self mentioning it, are working within half of the zone we draw it, and has opposite impact on the other half: this provides subtle degrade, however it also has an impact on the rest of the pictures which is either before or after the filter. This is very difficult to use in the middle of a picture without impacting the rest of the photo. In this case, you need to work with the Adjustment Brush only which might take you more time.

Overall, I’m very pleased with the graduated filters, and I think I’ll use this technique more and more, especially when having landscape situations with sunset/sunrise or with very distinct zones as you can find in the Swiss mountains. I’d be very happy to read your comments on this, especialy if you have experienced both of them! Here are another few pics using the Graudated filters. Enjoy the view!

I receive lot of requests from people seeing my landscapes and cityscapes to know how I’m doing it! In this tutorial, I’m not going to give all the details, but I’d like to explain the workflow I’m using to make some of my landscapes pictures. I’d consider it as intermediate level reading, so if you’re really a beginner in terms of photography or HDR, then I’d propose you to look on the following link: definition in wikipedia.

Before and After… The first picture is still pretty good, but I tend to find the second one treated with HDR more interesting, with dreaming look that defines a specific atmosphere.

So, what’s needed?

First, you need to have a great DSLR camera that would deliver you high quality RAW with low noise. In fact, noise is quite annoying when getting at the end of the process. It gives pretty bad results in the sky or the water. So, shooting at 100 to 200 ISO is maximum requested. At 400 ISO, you won’t necessarily get something great to look at.

Large wide areas are what makes these pictures very wide. It has some negative spaces wich are very appreciated. Therefore, if you know how to masterize the golden rule of third, make sure to have 2/3 on sky and 1/3 on land when you have large and flat landscapes. When facing water and sky only, then get 2/3 for sky (especially if that’s a sunset or sunrise). However, when you have mountains, it would be better to get 1/3 only for the sky. Clouds deliver something pretty magic in HDR. This is why perfect blue skies are not very impressive for this method, but prefer cluttered sky. The contrast on the clouds will give drama to your picture.

OK… you shot your picture in RAW, you’re satisfied with the composition, you have no zones over or under exposed. For the purpose of this trial, we’ll use a picture I’ve done today in Lavaux, a recently UNESCO awarded region on the East of Lausanne, in Vaud. Full of vineyards, there is some dramatic view on the lake and the Alps. The last days it was snowing, so it would give something “wonder winter” to the photography! Here is the original file:

Let’s start post-processing

To make HDR, you need softwares to treat the pictures and get it done fast and easily! Personally, I’m using Adobe Lightroom 2.1 for treating all RAWs and Photomatix Pro 3.1 (Beta) to work on HDR. The two softwares are very easy to use, quick and have pretty nice range of options to get to the outputs I want. There are frequent updates which make it even better time after time. All my HDR workflow is done with a single RAW exposure, which delivers few benefits to me:

Easier to manage, in terms of shooting photography and disk storage

Quicker

No problems with moving objects or people, and therefore no ghost artifacts

You’ll probably find lot of people telling you that this is not good and that you have some bad saturated results, however with today’s camera and the noise treatment, it’s feasible and tend to deliver nice results. You can give a try and let me know! To make HDR, you need a few different exposures of the same photography. In Lightroom, this is very simply done by creating 2 virtual copies.

Then change manually the exposures of each virtual copy by adding/reducing by -/+ 3EV. I’m playing by range of 3EV (on total, this makes 6EV scope), but you can play with lower range if you have some burnt zone in the original picture.

You need to export it in TIFF 16bits.

Here are the 3 different exposures (-3EV, 0EV, +3EV):

HDR Workflow

Now, you need to open Photomatix Pro and load the 3 pictures in TIFF. Generate HDR and in the options, you need to select the correct range of exposure, since Photomatix tends to not understand it automatically. It will also help you reducing the results randomness that it provocates sometime with automatic exposure setting.

That’s the first results, before we apply tonemapping. The images doesn’t pay justice to the finale results, since your computer can’t display such huge range of color and light data. That’s the reason for doing tonemapping, which enable to finalise the setup and provide correct color rendering that can be viewed and printed on all type of devices.

Now, you need to find you own tonemapping setup, and this requires some experiences to understand what are the right options to get stunning pictures. What is considered as a great result also depends on what you prefer yourself, and therefore this is very personal. The strenght of HDR you apply, the lightning you select and the several other options will give different results depending on many factors that are very complex to list here. This is why I let you deal with that and make your own experience tweaking the buttons! After doing some setup, this is the final render I have chosen to go with:

Isn’t it already better? The contrast is strong but not too heavy, the colour cast is pleasant to see and there is light on all zones of the photo. Export it as a TIFF 16bit to make sure we keep it in high definition. However, it’s not necessarily final, and we still need to finalise it before posting!

Final Touch-up for stunning render

Now, that’s where some of the people don’t always do: treat it again to get the final touch, what would make it stunning or just “hmm… I’m not a big fan of HDR…”. You need to import the tonemapped TIFF into Lightroom again. And that’s where you need to correct contrast, noise, saturation and a few other things that again are very personal and which would make it your own style! Look at the sky and how it is rendered, with more contrast and great warm colours. For me, that’s the final result, and I hope you appreciate it!

Lavaux Final Picture - 1280*1084 to be used as wallpaper if you want! Enjoy the view!

Let me know if that helped you and if you feel now more equipped to make stunning postcards! I’d be very happy to seeing the results you do with this tutorial, so please post a message with a link to your work to show it to all of us!

As you can see HDR can definitely help you to get stunning effects in difficult situations, where the dynamic range of the camera is not enough. Here below another few photos from my landscape and cityscape gallery to let you see which type of dramatic effect you can get with this technique.